Beyond temporality: Notes on the anthropology of time from a shrinking fieldsite

Ringel, Felix

Abstract

With the help of ethnographic material from Germany’s fastest shrinking city, I critically engage in this paper with the term ‘temporality’. By bringing together recent insights from the anthropology of time and the future, the literature on post-socialism, and contemporary philosophical debates on the problem of presentism, I pursue a thorough re-conceptualization of time as a matter of knowledge practices. I thereby question the idea of temporality as an inherent quality of anthropology’s objects of inquiry. Beyond temporality, I urge for abandoning such temporal attributions altogether whilst scrutinizing the temporal underpinnings of our own theories and analytics, as manifested in the term post-socialism. I claim that if anthropologists, and other social scientists, want to avoid determinists’ fallacies they should acknowledge that there is, indeed, no need for temporality in their analyses.

Citation

Ringel, F. (2016). Beyond temporality: Notes on the anthropology of time from a shrinking fieldsite. Anthropological Theory, 16(4), 390-412. https://doi.org/10.1177/1463499616659971

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: Jun 27, 2016
• Online Publication Date: Dec 14, 2016
• Publication Date: Dec 14, 2016
• Deposit Date: Sep 8, 2017
• Publicly Available Date: Jun 21, 2019
• Journal: Anthropological Theory
• Print ISSN: 1463-4996
• Electronic ISSN: 1741-2641
• Publisher: SAGE Publications
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 16
• Issue: 4
• Pages: 390-412
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1177/1463499616659971
• Public URL: https://durham-repository.worktribe.com/output/1376906